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Faith mentioned something to me yesterday that I’m not sure is a good or bad thing, at least not until I test it. Holy Paladins are probably the least squishy healer out there just because they have: plate armor; shields; a tank-based sub-spec. Even completely unbuffed my armor can mitigate 60% of all incoming physical damage, avoid 14% of it through defenses and cast a variety of bubbles on myself to reduce or entirely mitigate anything left. The only place they seem to fall down is magic damage, and being a Blood Elf, I have a 2% gain over any other Alliance Paladins right off the bat.

But I won’t ramble too much about defense, I’m a healer, not a tank. What I will talk about though, is the Divine Sacrifice Paladin, a Paladin who ventures 17 points into the Protection Tree to pick up Divine Sacrifice (redirect 30% of all damage to the party onto the Paladin) and Divine Guardian (provides a 20% shield wall to all raid members for 6 seconds). So you’re giving a 50% reduction to your whole party (usually all healers together, though as a Paladin you should probably be in with the tanks for this very ability) and a 20% reduction to the whole raid. If you’re expecting a 10k*25 hit on your group, this ability alone can mitigate 50k damage in a single GCD. Of course, you’ll also be taking 8k+(30% of 8k * 4)22.4k damage from the AoE itself plus the redirects, so this skill is pretty much bound to Divine Protection or Divine Shield, lest you get yourself deaded. However, in order to pick up Divine Guardian, you’re going to need 3 points in Improved Righteous Fury (6% damage reduction for all incoming damage), so that figure will shrink once again, and then, right at the bottom of the list on the RNG you could even go so far as to pick up Blessed Life for a potential (10% chance) of reducing the damage of a single hit (though each hit is rolled separately, so you might get all or you might get none!) by 50%!

So musing rambles asides, I was seriously looking at the idea of getting Blessed Life for the 10% chance of a half damage hit. In places like ICC where raid damage is usually significant I can see this being quite a good thing to take, the only problem is I need to pull 3 points from somewhere else. Oh, I know, from the Protection tree.

Why am I so anal on being a good damage sponge, anyway? Well, with Mist being heavy on Resto Shamans, I’m going to almost always be able to expect a Mana Spring totem down, and by default all Resto Shamans (should) have the improved version of this, providing it with a further 20% extra healing which is the same as our Improved Blessing of Wisdom. Because the Shaman talent is mandatory, and our talent is only optional, I can afford to skip on this talent for any raid that has a Resto Shaman in it. So now I have two spare points, both of which I point into the next talent over, Blessed Hands. Now I know it’s not my job to watch the threat of DPS, but giving a DPS of my choice a 40% threat reduction/removal over 10 seconds (probably Runningwater and his Swipe happy playstyle) is rather nice, but more importantly, being able to give a tank a 40% shield wall for as long as it takes them to absorb 30k damage on a single GCD seems unfoundedly useful. Maybe. On the other hand, because this is always capped at 30k damage (my ICC25 buffed HP as the caster), I can’t help but wonder if it’d be better to absorb that 30k over a long (untalented) or short (talented) period of time. A lot of care has to be taken here too, because a tank taking two big hits in a row could leave me with half of my HP wiped out, which is where things like Divine Protection and Improved Righteous Fury come in.

Holy Paladins are tank healers, yes, but that’s only one of their two niches. Their other niche is raid utility. We have Blessings, we have Hands, we have Aura Mastery, a ton of raid-wide skills that might make or break a hard mode, and I can’t help but think that any Holy Paladin who puts their spare 17-20 points into Retribution probably have a lot to answer for in terms of why they’re being lazy and aiming to crit high for the sake of the meters than make the life of the other 24 players that little bit less taxing. The reason I’m going for these changes is because I’m pulling talent points out of places that they were otherwise wasted. Improved Blessing of Wisdom? Same as the mandatory Shaman talent in the Restoration tree. Improved Devotion Aura? Same as the mandatory talent in the Protection tree for tanks and the Restoration tree for Druids. A lot of the talents in my build can be done the same or better by other players, which means that rather than create duplicate effects, I might as well go for something unique that no other player or class can do, like my 20% raid-wide shield wall or my 40% single target sacrifices.

So I got my Rogue to 60, little Sincraft is growing up fast. He’s no longer my bank alt, that responsibility has been given to Shiftstorm, my forgotten and unloved Druid. Seriously what’s with Druids? I thought they’d be one of the classes I’d love but they just don’t work at all. Feral of both sorts is just bland, Buttkin is horrifyingly dull, and Resto is so undeniably faceroll (REJUVEREJUVEREJUVEWILDGROWTHOSHI-SWIFTMEND) that I can’t help but feel like there’s barely any skill involved at all. Anyway, back on track, Rogue is proving surprisingly fun to be honest, it beats Feral Druid by a long shot and although it will never become my main (I love healing too much), it seems like something I’ll put some time into. That said, I felt the same about Shadowgrasp, Totemshock and Squiggle, and all of them are sitting on the bench now, so we’ll see where he goes.

I can’t help but jizz every time I use Killing Spree with Blade Flurry, just seeing a stream of numbers hurled across my screen gives me that warm, fuzzy feeling inside, the same feeling I get when I eat babies with mint sauce, or throw badgers into cement mixers.

Short post, Wrath of Wisdom finally got to Lich King, the one night I wasn’t there too. Naytha apparently went Disc, not sure how that went given that Lhuranan is usually a bit cautious about healers changing specs, but they got Sindragosa down before the 15% so it’s all good.

20% buff starts tomorrow, so we should have no excuse not to have it down within the next two or three weeks, especially if we extend the lockout. That said, I’m not a huge fan of extends but in this case I’ll let it slide, we really want this kill. We really need this kill. I’m just worried that people might get ahead of themselves and think that we’re cut out for Heroic just because we down him once. My opinion? We should have him set to at least “on farm” (as in, five wipes or less) before we start playing with the big boys. We definitely need to gear up the huge influx of trialists we’ve got in the guild anyway, I’m not sure 232 gear is viable for ICC Heroic.

So I’m hoping anybody with a brain will have read the new blue post that was quite nicely summarized on MMO-Champion as:

10-Man and 25-Man raids will share the same lockout.

10-Man and 25-Man raids difficulty will be as close as possible to each other.

10-Man and 25-Man raids will drop the exact same loot, but 25-man will drop a higher quantity of items.

Normal versus Heroic mode will be chosen on a per-boss basis in Cataclysm raids, the same way it works in Icecrown Citadel

For the first few raid tiers, our plan is to provide multiple smaller raids. Instead of one raid with eleven bosses, you might have a five-boss raid as well as a six-boss raid.

Personally, after seeing the end-game depression that we’re sliding into now, I don’t mind the change. People are complaining that it will ‘kill’ 25 man raiding for good and yes, it might well do, but I highly doubt it. Some guilds thrive on 25 man raiding, Wrath of Wisdom is one of them. Plus, you get rewarded for playing 25 man with extra loot/gold/badges per person, which offsets that extra hassle of having to co-ordinate 15 extra people.

The shared lockout isn’t a bad idea, I spend far too much time on this game and when I have to run the same raid four times a week across two characters (more when I get some more to 80, undoubtedly) I get sick to my stomach thinking about when I have to do it next, it’s just that drab. Knowing that I can slip into a 10 or25 man raid whenever and only have to do one or the other is a comfort because it means I can spend time doing other things, like non-Warcraft things. As if that would ever happen.

Multiple smaller raids is something I want to raise a very curious eyebrow at, since we’ve all seen what happens with these kinds of raids, yes, I’m talking Trial of the Crusader all over again. And possibly worse. As long as we don’t get some near-unheard of character calling shots for the whole expansion again by having a carnival with random monsters he’s managed to ‘slip into his giant Paladin Pokéball’ I guess it can’t quite be as bad as ToC, but smaller raids means less epicness on a grand scale. I quite liked walking into Naxx knowing I had to kill hordes of filthy Scourge, I didn’t quite like walking into ToC knowing I only had to kill 5 things then go AFK for the rest of the 9 hours per week raiding period. If anything, they should take note from Ulduar, yes it was huge but it was also epic, the scenery changed and it was like multiple raids glued into one big clusterfuck of awesome.

The whole raid changes for Cataclysm felt significant enough for me to make a note of, though it’s a fairly underwhelming post. Overall I’m happy as long as they don’t make it into the next Blizzard Carnival of Captured Crap and Loreless Nobodies, though I would quite like to see some ‘epic proportion’ raids again too. And I’m not talking copying and pasting Molten Core with higher level mobs either.

On a personal note, I’ve kind of found Wrath of Wisdom a replacement Restoration Shaman, which is good news because it means I have more of a chance to move to my Priest. I spoke to Esmi yesterday during her first raid back for two and a half weeks, and she said we were short of Priests anyway, and that she wouldn’t mind changing her recruiting around to see if we could get another Restoration Shaman instead, though hopefully I’ve beaten her to it. We’ll see how it goes, now isn’t the best time to be throwing things like this around, what with two officers on vacation and another officer effectively giving me the “I have better things to do than talk to you” finger, so I’ll probably press the issue in a couple of weeks on our next round of lockouts.

This is a post I’ve tried to hold off for as long as I can with writing, partly because it’s a cliche post that every single healer should make therefore I shouldn’t screw it up, and partly because I’ve not hit any rut in my gameplay that’s made me think “yes, this is enough to set me off on a healing rant”.

With that in mind, I just have to say one thing, from the perspective of every single healing class ingame: IT IS NOT MY JOB TO HEAL STUPID. You go stand in that fire, or void zone, or Cleave, or Whirlwind. You get those charity heals that I shouldn’t have to give out. No no don’t thank me for saving your ass from something you could have prevented. It’s fine. Keep standing there. Dying. Oh and when you corpse run, don’t blame me.

A bit long for a catchphrase, but that sums up every thought of every healer on the planet.

I ran Gundrak today with a Protection Warrior, a Shadow Priest, a Destruction Warlock and a Rogue of some variety. This was on my Shaman, who should be so overgeared here that I shouldn’t ever need more than Riptide to keep five people alive. As it happens, I was unpleasantly wrong, and the whole instance was me spamming every spell I had to keep people up.

Protection Warrior, let’s call him Bob, if he’d said “this is my first time tanking, ever” I would not have been surprised. Agro was all over the shot, people taking hits, even I got agro from Riptiding on a couple of occasions.

Shadow Priest, pulling with Mind Flay when the tank wasn’t ready, and a general “gogogo”er from the start. A firm reminder that him being a DPS meant that he didn’t choose the pace set him in his place.

Destruction Warlock, on follow on the Shadow Priest for half of the instance, didn’t bother DPSing at all on the first and second boss, did about half the DPS of the next guy. Only on the last boss did he manage to wake up for long enough to scream “HERO HERO” after I’d already used it, then told me I needed to learn to use my skills.

Rogue DPS spec #54897, I don’t care, they use pointy things and stab stuff, took two Poison Novas on the first boss and then cried when I told him to corpse run because I was in combat and unable to Res him.

Overall it was a pretty shocking group. Gundrak comes with its fair share of bad stuff to stand in by default, Mojo Puddles, Snake Wraps, Poison Novas, Whirlwinds, blah.

People can afford to get away with it though, due to Blizzard’s ‘all or nothing’ design of damage taking. Poison Nova does (even now) enough damage over its duration to completely erase a DPS’s health bar, and if I’m Snake Wrapped (which I was) then you’re going to die. In this case, I’d like to add, he did. Because every healing class has enough mana to pretty much spam their best heal for a boss fight and only just run OOM (or not) by the end of a boss fight , people assume that they’re going to get a heal and then when they don’t, they blame the healer for not healing.

Cataclysm, I’m so sincerely hoping, will be a lot different. When I have to make the choice between healing a stupid DPS who stands in Poison Nova and potentially running OOM, or not healing the stupid DPS and save my mana for the tank, then people will have less reason to complain. Right now I can only act on my moral high ground, come to my blog and effectively curl up and cry with my ranting, because Blizzard almost expects us to heal the stupid that their stupid encounters and mechanics have created. Call me pedantic but depending on how aggressively you chase the chain of causation, the very fact that Blizzard have plagued the game with encounters all focused on “DPS or Berserk” have lead DPS in this expansion to become tunnel visioned, not capable of dodging fire and poison because their DPS might suffer. Hopefully come Cataclysm, there won’t be as many ‘all or nothing’ encounters for people to tunnel vision on, and people might once again start using abilities that are helpful, not just wasting the mobs as fast as possible in the most damage-soaking way possible.

I don’t feel like I’ve really done this whole rant justice. I’ve used one dungeon example and picked on four players to get to what I really wanted to say, that it’s not my fucking job to heal you when you’re being a ‘tard.

When half of the damage in an instance is completely avoidable, and you’re not avoiding it, you’re being horribly irresponsible to the group in general. When Cataclysm hits in all its fake glory and broken promises, and my mana is precious, then after a few repair bills you might understand that all that time during Wrath when I was “playing God” and “not healing you because I could”, it was for your own damn good.

Healing is a force for good. You’re souring it by acting like a billy idiot. Bob idiot. Whatever.

Yeah, we’re quite late with this one but it’s taken a good three weeks (with the 10% buff) to finally get down the Blood Sucking Harlet, meaning only two more bosses to go until we can start working on the Heroic versions of each. Screenshot of the actual kill is linked to the above image, including my rather cluttered UI (I like it, who cares what you think). A short post really, I was going to do one for Putricide, but compared to BQL he’s actually a pushover so I’m glad I saved it. We had a few tries on Sindragosa too, not exactly the most thrilling of bosses but we’ll get her down within a week I’m sure.

I’ve been on an alt spam lately, my Priest is level 16 and my Rogue is level 12, both are a bit of fun to play from time to time, though I’m tempted to just name/race change Pendulus save me having to level a Priest to 80 all over again. Rogues are such a daunting class, three trees that all serve the same purpose – to DPS – all with entirely different ways to do it and if I pick the wrong tree then BAM, I’ll look rather silly. At the minute I have so few talent points that it’s not a problem anyway, but for somebody who’s not a melee-lover it’s just a bit of a confusing decision as to which is best and why and blah. Even more annoying when people won’t refer to the trees by their names or even by their talents, you don’t hear people asking me to go Penance Priest or Beacon Paladin, so why would I want to be a Mutilate Rogue? Nitpicking, yes, but it’s just unhelpful when I’m lost enough as it is.

I’ve been watching one of our Holy Priests today, and the healing output is crippled compared to everybody else. We have Paladins on top as usual, and Druids/Shamans tying for the next three spots, then a Holy Priest right at the bottom with barely 5k HPS output (and a third of that overhealing). What I don’t get is that why either: 1) nobody has spoken to them about it in the past; or 2) why they haven’t noticed it themselves. Nobody can claim to not have recount, that’s like most people claiming they don’t look at GS, it’s bullshit because they clearly do even if only to brag about their 6k. And yes, I’m well aware that recount isn’t the do all and end all of healing, but if you’re slipping behind with 3.5 EHPS compared to the rest of the group pulling 6-7k EHPS then surely you’re going to consider why.

It’s a bit of a trial and error thing, every Priest is going to have Prayer of Mending and Circle of Healing as their baseline spells, and then they’re going to fill in with either Flash Heal, Prayer of Healing or Renew. Surely then, the filling in spell varies between situations. A fight like Saurfang where there’s not much AoE, then you’ll probably just throw a few Flash Heals around to snipe people up after Boiling Blood or whatnot. A fight like Festergut with a predictable AoE would be prime for Prayer of Healing. A fight like BQL or Sindragosa with a steady ticking aura, then, surely is the best place to throw Renews around.

We spent the whole night doing the latter two, BQL and Sindragosa, and the whole fight consisted of Prayer of Healing spam. The problem is, we already had two Shamans popping Chain Heal for the ‘immediate’ healing, but only one Druid doing HoTs. So then, where would a Holy Priest find 2.6 seconds of cast to throw out yet another immediate heal to compete with the spam of green Jesus Beams already flying everywhere. Surely a steady ticking of ten or so Renews rolling around would suit an aura-based fight so much better, rather than just rolling into overhealing. That on top of the fact that Prayer of Healing is the most horribly mana squishy spell ever means a smoother, more mana efficient healing.

I’m just musing because I can. I was going to ask Slater about the possibility to changing my Shaman out so I could play my Priest again, the problem is that somebody beat me to it. Nagarjun’s Hunter has been switched out for his Warrior, and I highly doubt the officers are going to want to make two switches in a day. That on top of the fact that a switch will only be made “if it suits the guild”. My Shaman is a ‘needed’ part of the healing team, more so than any Priest, and until it isn’t, having a main change is going to be nigh impossible. Either I need to really start sucking, or I need to find a replacement so I can effectively ‘step down’ and reapply on a new character. Ugh. Effort.

So not so much a WoW blog as a real life blog, I mentioned recently that my computer was having a few issues with running Warcraft, and that I was taking a step back from raiding until I could get it fixed. What with it being my depressingly void 21st Birthday on Monday, I got a bit of spare cash to buy the parts I wanted. Bought an extra 4GB of RAM, a second monitor (obviously not needed to run Warcraft, but at least now I have an excuse to watch the DVDs I borrow) and Windows 7 (which I’m backing up files ready to install as I type this).

I did a raid on Monday (I got the parts that day) and managed to get through the whole thing with every graphical setting known to man on max without a single crash, error or even screen stutter. Better yet, I managed to do some pretty nifty healing, as much as Lhuranan anyway, so I presume that I have my mojo back once again. Not sure I’ll be able to do tonight, depending on how long 7 takes to do, but I’m in no hurry, I did say I’d be gone until this Friday and I’m under the impression that I won’t be docked DKP for skipping until that point (conversely, I’m under the impression that I won’t be given DKP for Monday’s raid since I wasn’t meant to be there).

I made a new Priest ready for Cataclysm, Telyth. Level 16 at the minute, the grind to 15 (and the ability to use LFG) wasn’t too bad, though I thought that Westfall was a bit quest-starved, but maybe that’s just me. I’m playing as Discipline for a change, I leveled as Holy last time so I’m going to mix things up a bit, maybe change to Shadow later on (I’ve been playing Shadow since 3.0.3, I know how it works). I’m also planning on reviving my Discipline Priest guide, as well as drafting up a shiny new Holy Priest guide, see if I can get a bit of interest on those. Hoping Esmi might run over the Disc one to double-check I’m not talking rubbish, since she’s the authority there, and I’m pretty sure I can write Holy from experience alone.

Something really bothered me yesterday though, I was in my first ever LFG on Telyth, with a Rogue, Warrior and Hunter, (the Paladin tank had left already). The Rogue would Sap mobs every now and again (usually the casters), but other DPS would just break it by targeting that mob directly. All I did was make an idle comment of “if the Rogue Saps it, there’s no need to DPS it right away”, and the Rogue turns around and tell me to “shut the fuck up”, followed by a stream of abuse about how I owe him for saving my life (I had mobs on me, he pulled them off me, I didn’t ask him to), and that I know nothing about the game and that I’m a “low life” “retard” “noob” who needs to (again) “shut the fuck up”. Now, I’m so weathered to this sort of abuse that I just shrug it off and carry on dungeoning, the problem was that it’s not the usual sort of abuse, especially when it’s unprovoked. If I were a run of the mill level 15, first character, never played WoW before and had no idea what I was doing, comments like that would just make me want to curl up and never play WoW again, that’s how negative I felt afterwards. I immediately filed a ticket about it, and a few hours later (inconveniently during our Marrowgar 10 attempt, which caused me to have sucky healing for him and Deathwhisper while I chatted) a GM popped up and asked me about the character in question. I gave the name and a synopsis of what had happened, and the GM vanished saying “he’d fix it” but “I couldn’t know about the outcome because it wasn’t really any of my business”. Now, in the real world, somebody mugs me and I’m more than welcome to sit in the public gallery to hear his sentence. Why can’t I find out if the Rogue got a similar punishment?

We know this story anyway. He’ll get a slap on the wrist, and that’s it. No suspension, the GM won’t bother doing anything at all other than sending a macro’d “be nice” mail to him, and the world will keep turning and he’ll keep being an ass. I don’t mind, I’m not some self-righteous sword of justice wanting to bring redemption upon his head, I just thought it was a bit of a stupid thing to say.

Speaking of negative players, Sheepless recruited a Warrior DPS yesterday (by the name of Yoshi (stupid letter accents included if I knew how to type them)) who immediately gained a less than favorable response from the guild. Njevarfu, Tomjones and Yaoigirl all messaged me within 10 minutes of each other saying how they’d taken a dislike to him and how immature he was. Now, I was polite as usual and hey, until he’s shown his real stuff (he might be the next Slater, or better; conversely he might be the next Edicia) I don’t want to judge him, so I stayed friendly, though apparently I shouldn’t have because Tomjones is now using me as some sort of ‘question funnel’, making me ask the questions that he either can’t be bothered to or just doesn’t have the nerve to. Age, old guild history, play time, the usual suspects, though I can’t help feel a little bit distasteful towards the conduct. It’s fair to say that perhaps TJ or Slater should have done the recruiting interview (since they’re the Warrior class buffs), but on the other hand it’s also fair to say that TJ should be able to ask the questions he wants in the open without needing to masquerade behind another player. It just makes me feel a bit ‘bleh’ about being used, it left a bitter aftertaste that I didn’t even get a “thanks” for my time afterwards either, it’s not my job to do it and I did it anyway.

Anyway. Bitchiness asides, I really shouldn’t whine about officers because I know that both Sheepless and Esmi read this. On the other hand, my blog, my rules, I did warn them before they read it, so whatever.

I’ve got another 20 minutes of file backups (moving them to my netbook while I wipe my desktop) to do, then my flatmate and I are heading to Maplins to spend some more money on computer parts. Hopefully I’ll be all sorted by the time I have to raid this evening, but if the case is that I’m not, then it’s not a big deal, Wednesday signups are usually massive anyway, free badges and stuff, and my attendance isn’t expected anyway.

I’ve heard of the pre-expansion depression but I’ve never actually felt it, since Wrath was my first expansion and I apparently missed the whole downer at the end of TBC. It’s like, you’re driving a Prius and you’re told that you’re getting a Jag, but only in a few months. The Prius just feels shitty after that.

I only really enjoy raiding and playing with Veir nowadays. Logging in to do some chatting with the guild is fine, and I don’t mind flying mindlessly around maps farming Ores and hoping I get some decent money from it, but there’s just nothing exceptional anymore. Icecrown Citadel is losing its charm very fast, I’ve seen all the boss fights and I’ve done most of them, and I just don’t feel inspired anymore. My Shaman is fully geared up minus perhaps a weapon, so there’s nothing to improve upon there until we get to Heroic fights. My Priest really needs the gearing up but nowadays I just don’t feel like doing ICC10 and I don’t particularly want to PuG 25. My Paladin is losing charm too, tanking isn’t what I enjoy doing and I’m sick of Holy. I’ve got one of every class except Rogue and Mage, and I really don’t feel like burning one of my new class choices until I can level through all of the new Cataclysm content.

I’m not burning out, I’m still playing and doing my dailies and stuff, and my shiny new mount makes me love flying idly around Dalaran or herbing or mining, I guess really I’m just bored without raiding, which I can’t do until next week. The raids bore me, but when I’m running with twenty four other people, some of whom I compete with on a friendly basis and some of whom I just want nothing more than to impress, I can overcome the repetitive content because it’s still entertaining, and I quite miss out Ventrilo conversation that usually end up turning into Gnoor bashing or general sillyness.

Blizzard keeps releasing more and more Cataclysm goodies, and I’m not sure what to do with them, it’s the carrot dangling on the stick just longer than my arm and I want it. I’m aware that nothing content-wise is going to entertain me in Wrath, not now I’ve seen how much awesome joy is to come, so I need to find something to do that’ll inspire me for long enough to play. The guild really is it at the minute, though I feel awkward saying that because I also sound like I’m playing just for the guild, which isn’t true.

It’s complicated. Everybody’s feeling a little blue, but I’ll keep playing WoW no matter what, whether I’m in a guild or not and whether I have friends or not, it’s just what I do. I fly around, I farm, I chat, I raid. So the content is boring, but the people aren’t, and that’s really the key to keeping me here. Yes, I’m probably paying £9 a month for what is effectively a glorified MSN, but to keep in contact with the people I am, I’d pay that and more. I keep thinking about everything Esmi has said to me, and it’s invigorating, that I’ve been in the guild for less than two months and I’ve already made an impression. If I give them two months more, and two months after that, then Cataclysm will be here and I’ll really be able to step up again and give it everything. I’m over my ‘bad player’ thing, I’ve got my mojo, I’ve got my guild and I’ve got my ‘Retarded Horse’, I’m set to play, just, perhaps, not with as much vigor as I would if it were all shiny and new and Cataclysmic.